Their commitment to open source, however, might go.

Quite recently Google quietly unshipped an effort to make their protobuf build rules more useful to OSS users of Bazel (see the rules_proto repository). This wasted a huge amount of planning and work that'd gone into the migration.

And the fact that these tools are designed first and foremost for Google use shows up everywhere. Stuff that Google fundamentally doesn't care about but is widely used (eg Ruby) is stagnant.

In this state, it's totally reasonable to reconsider whether these tools are worth building on top of. I personally still believe! But I don't blame people who are skeptical.